Body of objects

D Harding's work explores the traditions and untold histories of their communities. Their recent research has focused on the stencilled imagery that can be found at sandstone sites across Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland. These extraordinary rock art galleries record weaponry, domestic tools and ceremonial objects that are specific to the region.

In response to these enduring indexes of Aboriginal material culture, Harding has produced a suite of silicon cast objects using the stencilled imagery as a guide, along with objects that relate to their family history. The resulting installation complicates any easy distinction between notions of original and copy, traditional and contemporary, utilitarian object and cultural fetish. The forms are variously opaque and translucent, flaccid, and sometimes embedded with spikes. This mutability works to unsettle the conventions of their museum-style display, which references the way in which such objects have been displaced, exchanged and interpreted since colonisation.